Yoo Seungho (b. 1974) creates paintings where text and image engage in a playful relationship, forming a single cohesive image. However, the words used in his works do not align semantically with the images. Regarding this, Yoo explains, "The essence of my work lies in analyzing, deconstructing, and rendering meaning meaningless."
 
He moves intuitively and playfully between "writing" and "drawing," freely revealing accidental relationships that are not directly expressed through language or societal norms within his canvases.

Yoo Seungho has continued to create works by forming images through dots or written characters using simple tools such as pens, ink, and paper. His early works, characterized by labor-intensive pointillism, feature repetitive compositions of meaningless dots, creating a distinct sense of abstraction.

One of his signature series, ‘Text Landscapes,’ appears like traditional Korean landscape paintings from a distance. However, upon closer inspection, the images are composed of thousands of characters, each floating across the canvas with its own set of rules. The words forming these landscapes include onomatopoeic and mimetic expressions often found in comic books, such as “Joo Roo Roo Rook” or “Shoo~,” as well as colloquial phrases like “Euh-ssi” or “that’s scary,” resembling playful jokes.
 
For example, in his 2000 piece Pu-Ha-, he repeatedly wrote the words “푸 (Pu)” and “하 (Ha)” tens of thousands of times, reimagining the forms of trees and mountain cliffs. While Yoo’s ‘Text Landscapes’ visually align with the imagery of traditional ink-and-wash landscapes, the text elements constructing these images bear little to no direct semantic connection to the overall image.

Yoo Seungho incorporates various traditional masterpieces, including Dream Journey to the Peach Blossom Land by An Gyeon, a court painter from the early Joseon Dynasty, into his ‘Text Landscapes’. However, rather than focusing on the historical context, background, or meaning of these works, Yoo draws attention to the powerful visual energy that captivates his own perspective. 
 
The artist empties the context of traditional motifs, techniques, philosophies, and theories, and fills the void with vibrant visual and auditory language. This approach results in Yoo’s unique interpretation of landscapes, where he experiments with the interplay between text and image within traditional iconography chosen intuitively and emotionally.
 
By doing so, Yoo blurs the boundaries between language and painting, as well as between the past and the contemporary, creating a multitude of variations and reinterpretations.

Yoo Seungho’s text-based paintings extend beyond paper to encompass physical space. When his text-image works migrate onto the walls and floors of exhibition spaces, they not only traverse the boundaries between disparate elements within the painting but also infiltrate three-dimensional space. In doing so, they establish new relationships with the physical elements and contextual layers of the environment, further expanding their dynamic interplay.

Meanwhile, Yoo Seungho’s other notable series, ‘echowords,’ reveals a stronger connection between language and imagery compared to his ‘Text Landscapes.’ The term "echowords," derived from its dictionary definition of "words that imitate or mimic," serves as the title for this series.
 
It features words that replicate sounds or states, such as onomatopoeia or mimetic expressions, which carry less specific meaning and instead capture the essence of a sound or condition through language.

This series begins with the idea that a word can evoke an image, or conversely, an image can give rise to a word. For instance, in woo soo soo soo (2017), the word “우수수수 (woo soo soo soo)” is written in bold brushstrokes at the top, while the surrounding space is filled with the falling shapes of the characters “우 (woo)” and “수 (soo).” 
 
Here, the characters visually represent the image suggested by the word “우수수수,” creating a direct connection between text and image. Through this interplay, the artist poses a question: Is it the text or symbols that imbue the image with meaning, or is it the other way around?

In the ‘Text Play’ series, Yoo Seungho explores words with dual meanings, unraveling them through playful linguistic puns. Typically employing onomatopoeia, mimetic words, or phonetic transliterations of foreign words, he deconstructs the meaning of language or text, expressing it as it sounds or is written. 
 
For example, in natural (뇌출혈), the Korean word "뇌출혈" (meaning cerebral hemorrhage) phonetically resembles the English word "natural." This wordplay serves as the starting point for the piece. Yoo fluidly unfolds unrelated words, connected only by sound, across the canvas in a stream-of-consciousness style. In his paintings, "뇌출혈" transforms into "natural," "natural" becomes a mountain forming a sublime landscape, and at some points, it morphs into birds flying off to the distant edges of the canvas.

Meanwhile, in the ‘hypertext’ series, Yoo Seungho presents a closer integration of text and image, where they appear inseparably intertwined. Inspired by the concept of "hypertext" from the World Wide Web (WWW), which connects individual pieces of information through links, these works break away from the fixed meanings of text and adopt a freely connected structure. 
 
Yoo focuses on loose associations and repetitions that precede the definition of textual meaning. For example, he deconstructs conventional words with fixed meanings and forms, reducing them to a raw, primal state through a hypertextual process. Gradually fragmented and dispersed, the characters undergo non-linear transformations, existing in a liminal space that is neither fully text nor image, but somewhere in between.

In Yoo Seungho's 2015 solo exhibition 《Shaking your hair loose》 at Perigee Gallery, elements from his earlier text-based works were combined with the experimental approaches of the ‘hypertext’ series. The exhibited works featured a wide range of motifs, including orchids commonly depicted in East Asian paintings, pyramids, dragons, erotic paintings in the style of Shin Yun-bok, pinwheels, numbers, and lotus patterns from Goguryeo murals. 
 
The techniques employed in the works were equally diverse, ranging from brush painting to tearing paper. With this eclectic mix of content, materials, styles, and methods, Yoo deliberately created an ambiguity that makes it challenging to pinpoint a specific meaning or interpretation.

For Yoo Seungho, this chaotic state is seen as an ideal rather than a limitation. He regards the moment when text and image intertwine and lose their fixed meanings as the most liberating and ideal state. Elements that break away from predetermined meanings or forms freely traverse through time and space within his paintings, drifting seamlessly in a state of fluidity and openness.

Yoo Seungho captures the unexpected creation of new forms by spraying fine particles of water onto line drawings in his series ‘Miss Lamella.’ In this series, he borrows the chemical concepts of lamella structure or folded chain.
 
The lamella structure refers to a formation where molecules meet and form layers, resulting in a stable and solid final structure. In reality, this molecular structure is difficult to form into a perfect crystalline chain, and only through heat-treated processing can a slightly more stable form emerge.

Yoo Seungho discovered that the forms he constructs using symbols and images resemble molecular structures. He then imagined the dense lettering in his previous works as "molecules" and, through a series of processes, began building layers upon layers to create a stable, polymer-like structure.
 
In the resulting paintings, the forms become structured, but ironically, the fixed and definitive meanings of the letters are deconstructed. Due to the chemical action of the artist’s spray technique, the individual elements in his paintings transform non-linearly, intertwining and generating new forms on their own.
 
Yoo Seungho explains that the important aspect of his work is that "this is neither writing nor drawing." The binary boundaries that separate image and language, signifier and signified, form and formlessness, consciousness and unconsciousness, are rendered powerless within his paintings. As a result, elements that were once perceived as opposites or foreign to one another reflect and combine, establishing an organic relationship that offers a witty reflection on the real boundaries we see and feel.

“My play is to let heavy meanings flow lightly and float freely in the space of the screen. In the end, into the dream where only pleasure, instinct, pleasure, and humour retain…So the text and images represented on the screen are playing with me, laughing ‘hehehe’” (Yoo Seungho, Artist’s Note)

Yoo Seungho graduated from the Department of Painting at Hansung University. Currently, he lives and works in Seoul. Yoo has held solo exhibitions at many major galleries and nonprofit organizations domestically and internationally, including the ARTERTAIN (Seoul, 2021); CR Collective (Seoul, 2019); the P21 (Seoul, 2017); DOOSAN Gallery (New York, USA, 2013); and the ONE AND J. Gallery (Seoul, 2005).
 
He has participated in several group exhibitions, including the Mori Art Museum (Tokyo, 2022, 2009); Ulan Art Museum (Ulsan, Korea, 2022), National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea (Cheongju, Korea, 2020), DOOSAN Gallery (Seoul, 2014); Seoul Museum of Art (Seoul, 2013); and the Alternative Space LOOP (Seoul, 2006). He was awarded the Excellence Award at the 5th Gongsan Art Festival in 1998 and the 22nd Seoknam Art Award in 2002.
 
His works are in the collections of the Hong Kong Burger Collection; the Abu Dhabi Administration Building; the Queensland Art Gallery; the Mori Art Museum; and the Museum of Fine Art Houston.

References

• 현대자동차, brilliant 30: 작가 유승호 (Hyundai Motor, brilliant 30: Artist Yoo Seungho)
• 가회동60, yodeleheeyoo~ (GAHOEDONG60, yodeleheeyoo~)
• 페리지갤러리, 머리채를 뒤흔들어 (Perigee Gallery, Shaking your hair loose)
• 두산아트센터, echowords (DOOSAN Art Center, echowords)
• P21, 머리부터 발끝까지 (P21, From Head to Toe)
• 씨알콜렉티브, 라멜라 양 (CR Collective, Miss Lamella)